Page 47

46.

The first thing I noticed about my father was how small he’d become. Standing before him, I could look him almost straight in the eyes; and he had lost weight since I’d last seen him, so that the jeans he was wearing were staying up only because they had snagged on the sharp edges of his hip bones. Had I grown that much, that fast, or had I simply taken him down off his pedestal to finally see him at the size he had always been?

Monster, hero, the looming figure of my childhood, the determined rebel of his memoir: No matter who he really was, it suggested someone far more substantial. This man, soaked to the bone, nervously hunched in the gloom of an alley, looked like he might get blown over by a strong breeze.

He wore a plain black hoodie that I did not recognize, underneath a shapeless wool overcoat, and tennis shoes instead of the work boots I was used to seeing on his feet. His face was clean-shaven—even the mustache was gone—and he was wearing wire-rimmed glasses that I was sure must be part of his disguise. My father had his issues, but myopia was not one of them. I had to assume he’d also seen the Wanted image of him that had been all over the news and was doing the best he could to distance himself fromit.

I was so startled by his appearance that I didn’t see the hug coming. Before I had time to prepare my thoughts, I found myself wrapped in his arms. “Oh, Jane, I’ve missed you,” he said into my ear, his voice low and choked. It triggered something liquid insideme.

I hung limply inside his familiar embrace, as stunned and compliant as a cow on its way to slaughter. Finally, he released me and stepped back. “We need to talk,” he said. Rain dripped off his nose, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. “Where can we go?”

My thoughts spun in eddies; nothing made sense. I should have anticipated this, should have prepared so I’d know how to behave, but he’d caught me off guard. I glanced down the sidewalk, toward the glass-plated door of Signal, where a cluster of my coworkers were shaking out their umbrellas. “Not my office.”

“No.” His voice dripped with disdain. “Not your office, obviously.”

I wasn’t about to take him into South Park, where we’d have to face a steady stream of Signal employees stopping in for their bagels and lattes. “Do you want to get a coffee?” I asked.

The drizzle had turned into a stinging rain. He tugged his hood back over his head. “I don’t care. But we can’t stand out here on the street.”

“There’s a Starbucks up on Market Street,” I said. “Let’s go there.”

I pivoted, expecting him to follow; we’d only walked a few feet when somehow I found myself walking behind him, struggling to keep up as he loped, waterlogged, up the street. Cursing myself for the fact that I was already trying to keep up with him, on my own home turf. How had he destabilized me so fast?

It was 9:00 a.m. and the Starbucks was crowded with morning commuters impatiently waiting on line to fuel their addictions. The floor was papered with a spill of soggy paper napkins; muffin crumbs and abandoned cups littered the tables. The walls reverberated with the grind of coffee beans, the hiss of the espresso machine, the generically jazzy music blasting over the speakers, a cacophony that made it an ideal place for us to talk without having to worry about strangers listeningin.

I bought a coffee and a croissant for myself—and then, after deliberating, bought the same for my father—and brought them to the table in the corner where my father sat, his eyes darting across the crowded room. I placed the croissant in front of him, an offering, and he looked down at it with a curl of his lip. “You eat this crap now?”

“It’s pastry, Dad. Not poison.”

“It’s hardly a pastry. It’s a preservative-filled facsimile that’s made in a factory somewhere and sealed in plastic and shipped down here in giant trucks that spew diesel fumes the whole way, just so you can have a subpar breakfast because you’re too lazy to prepare one yourself.”

“Well, I think it’s delicious.” I picked up mine and took a big bite, gamely ignoring the fact that it was, unfortunately, rather gummy and stale; then washed it down with a scalding gulp of acrid coffee. He offered me a baleful gaze.

We stared at each other across the table. My father, for once, seemed to be at a loss for what to say—or, more likely, he had so many things to say, none of them complimentary, that he didn’t know where to start. So I jumped in first. “How did you find me?”

He rolled his eyes, as if this was the stupidest question I could have begun with. “You were on national television, squirrel. Apparently you are the dot-com industry’s most enthusiastic employee.” He shook his head. “Was that a wise decision, you think?”

I flushed, despite myself. I wasn’t sure what decision he was referring to: my choice to let myself be filmed for a national television show when I was wanted for a crime; or my choice to work at Signal in the first place. Possibly the latter was the more objectionable one.

“I like my job,” I said.

“I’m sure it’s not worthy of your intellect,” he said. “Do they have you making their coffee? Taking out their trash? Cleaning their computer screens?”

I refused to take the bait. “Why are you here, Dad? Shouldn’t you be in hiding somewhere?”

“No,” he said. “That’s not the question, Jane. Do you know what the correct question is?”

“My name isn’t Jane. It never was. Jane doesn’t exist.”

He ignored this. “The question is why are you here? Here, of all places. It’s like you didn’t absorb a single thing I taught you.” He managed to sound both wounded and disappointed at the same time, and it plucked at something deep inside me. I hated that my impulse was to try to apologize.

“I think you can guess why I’m here. And please, call me Esme. That’s my real name, although it’s also the name of a dead girl. Can you imagine what a strange position that is to find yourself in, Dad? To discover who you really are at the same time that you discover you are also legally dead?”

He didn’t seem surprised to hear that I knew everything. He drew the paper cup to him and took a sip of his coffee. “You want me to say I’m sorry?”

“That would be a start. My whole life was a lie, Dad. You hid me in the woods for fourteen years and lied to me about why we were there and kept me away from my mother . ” I regretted having brought him here, to such a public place; I was finding it difficult to keep my voice neutral and low.

My father glanced around us and leaned in closer, dropping his own voice. “I told you—I always told you—that I did that to protect you. All of that was true.”

“You needed to protect me from my mother ?” I shook my head. “I’ve met her, Dad. She’s hardly dangerous.”

“So you found your mother.”

“Yes.”

An uncharacteristic hesitation on his part. Was that nervousness? “Did you tell her about—”

I cut him off. “Not yet.”

“Ah.” The corners of his lips twitched up into a ghost of a smile, and I knew he had taken this as a sign of my ongoing fealty to him, rather than what it really was: cowardice. “And? Did you see?”

“See what?”

“What she is like. Why I needed to get you away.”

I bristled. “There was nothing wrong with her. She’s a famous writer and technologist. She won a genius grant . Everyone admires her.” I had made a conscious decision to overlook the disappointing aspects of our reunion. Her coolly rational response to meeting her dead daughter was not what I’d expected, it was true. But how much did I really know about the spectrum of human behavior? The number of people with whom I had ever held a prolonged conversation still numbered in the dozens. This was hardly a comprehensive survey of the magnificent diversity of the human mind. How was I to say what was “normal” and what was not, especially when that baseline had previously been set for me by a hermitic zealot?

I’d almost forgotten how it felt to be fixed in my father’s hawkish gaze, the way I could feel his disappointment crawling down into my guts and settling there. “So you didn’t find the pages I left for you,” he said.

“But I did.”

This wasn’t the answer he’d expected. He turned the coffee cup in his hand, frowning. “If you read them, you should understand what I was doing by taking you away from her. I was trying to protect you from becoming some test case of how technology can mold a child.”

I thought of the pages I’d deciphered just last night, pages where he described my mother as a monster; pages I’d read with a knot in my stomach, unsure who to believe. “That’s your perspective. Not a neutral one. Colored by your own biases and personal agenda. What you wrote, it reads like you’re trying to justify your actions, blaming her for what you did. The use of the second-person voice. As if trying to implicate me, your audience, in your actions; making me complicit, too.”

He gripped the edge of the table. “You have to trust me on this. The situation wasn’t healthy. She saw you as her experiment, a child she could model into her vision of the ideal human.”

“Like you did.”

This gave him pause. He tilted his head, gazing down his beakish nose at me. “Like I did?”

“You tried to turn me into you.”

“No,” he objected. “I just gave you all the knowledge that I had at my disposal. It was up to you to decide your own path.”

“How was I to take any path at all when I wasn’t even allowed to leave the cabin?”

“I was protecting you from outside influences, at least until you became an adult and had a fully formed brain.”

“I am an adult. I turned eighteen, months ago. Or did you forget my real birthday, too?”

He shook his head, as if trying to disentangle himself from a noose I’d just flung around his neck. “You’re missing the point, Jane.”

“ Esme. ”

He groaned. “Fine, Esme. ”

“ The point is that you kidnapped me in order to prevent me from becoming her science project, and you made me yours instead. You killed me, Dad. I don’t really exist, because of you.”

He blanched. “I know that may seem extreme. But what was the other option? Staying in Silicon Valley, in the belly of the beast, helplessly watching you get indoctrinated by your mother? I wanted you to have more than that. I wanted you to see what was beautiful about the real world. And you did, didn’t you? I gave you that gift.”

I thought of the tracks of the deer through the silver dew, the smell of moss growing on pines, the color of the sunrise lifting over our forest. As interesting and unpredictable as life was in San Francisco, there was still part of me that felt untethered here, on edge, in a way I never had in the woods. “Yes,” I said reluctantly. “But you also turned me into a criminal.”

He released his grip on the table. “Well. I didn’t plan for that to happen. You volunteered to come with me. I shouldn’t have let you. It didn’t go the way I’d intended.”

“But, Dad—why? Why are you doing this? You’re”—I leaned in and whispered urgently—“killing people. Killing your friends. ”

“They’re not my friends. They stopped being my friends a long time ago. They are the horsemen of the apocalypse. The work they are doing threatens humanity’s survival. They need to be stopped, and the world needs to understand why they should be stopped, and this was the only way to get everyone to pay attention.” He threw his hands up in frustration. “You read my manifesto. You know all this. I thought you understood.”

“I didn’t know you were going to murder people. It’s awful…It’s”—I struggled for a word he might relate to—“immoral.”

The morning commute crowd was thinning out and the rain outside was slowing to a drizzle. The café windows were fogged with steam, condensation dripping down the inside of the glass in fitful tears. My father took another sip of his coffee and then looked at me coolly. “Morality is just a construct, squirrel. An abstract idea,” he said. “There are six billion people in the world; what’s one less? Especially when that one person could potentially lead to the eradication of human existence. You could say I’m not killing people, I’m killing principles.”

“Like Raskolnikov. Crime and Punishment .”

He lit up. “Yes. Exactly. Smart girl.”

I hated the warmth that spread through my chest at his smile of approval. “Yeah, well, he ends up realizing that he’s not that special after all and confesses his crimes and is exiled to Siberia.”

He frowned. “It’s just a novel. What’s your point?”

“You need to stop. Now. No more bombs. No more killing. You’ve done enough.”

He made a sound, deep in his throat, that sounded like a cross between a grunt and a cough. “Was it you who took down my manifesto?”

“It was.”

He shook his head. “You think that really matters? You don’t think it’s already been copied and disseminated hundreds of times, thousands? People are listening to me. You can’t stop the spread of knowledge, now that it’s finally begun. I taught you all this.”

A man in a dripping trench coat sat down at the table next to us and shook out his umbrella. Tiny droplets flew into my father’s face and he flinched. I could see him fight the impulse to turn and glare at the man, making himself visible. Instead he took off the fake glasses and dabbed at his face with a paper napkin.

“You really think that getting rid of a few people is going to bring a halt to the forward progression of technology ? That’s unrealistic, Dad . ”

“Revolutions aren’t built on rational thinking. They are built on strength of conviction.”

“And anyway, technology isn’t all bad, Dad. I like the internet. The way it connects people. The way it gives you access to so much information you couldn’t get before. It makes life easier. And it’s so egalitarian.” I was trying to summon Ross’s rousing speech, but knew I’d fallen far short. “You like egalitarianism!”

His lips were a tight, white line. “Oh, Jane. You’ve been brainwashed. You’ve been working at that place, what, two months? Apparently swallowing any bullshit they feed you. Meanwhile, I have spent decades thinking about all this. I was on the front lines. I can see things you can’t.”

I sat back in my chair. Something about the way he was looking at me made me feel like a trapped bug running circles in a sink, unable to find my way back to the path I’d once been on. “But,” I said. And then I petered out. What did I really know, other than what Ross and the other futurists had been spouting? How was I to know that they were right, and my father was wrong?

“It’s not too late to redeem yourself,” he said suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“You took the money from the drawer in my office?”

“Yes. Where did it come from?”

“I liberated it,” he said. “Trust me, no one missed it. Anyway, I need that money. And the hard drive that I took from Peter.”

Something dawned on me. “Wait. Is that why you came looking for me? To get your stuff back?”

He frowned. “No. I came for you. But—you still have it, right?”

I picked at the crumbs from my croissant. “Why is the hard drive so important? What’s on it?”

“All Peter’s research. His AI algorithm.” He offered a twisted smile. “I will admit it, that is the one thing the internet is good for. Research. I brought that modem home to our cabin, thinking only about distributing my writing online. But then I discovered”—he cocked his head at me—“sorry, yes, you showed me —how much access it could give me to the current work that was being done in technology. All those university computer science research departments, all those academic accomplishments, all those start-up business plans and white papers and interviews, all posted online for anyone to read. I began to look up my old colleagues, one by one. And I was horrified. The things they were doing. The technology leaders they’d become over the last decade, marching us all toward our doom. I found a paper my coworker Peter had written, talking about the so-called groundbreaking new AI algorithm he was on the verge of releasing. What it was going to be capable of. And it was the same kind of stuff that I’d predicted would destroy us all, years ago. It wasn’t just an idea for the future, anymore; the future was now . That’s why I knew I had to stop him, that something had to be done. And so I did.”

He sat back in his chair, pleased with himself. “And now he’s gone, and I’m going to destroy his hard drive with all his work, too, so no one else can expand on it. Think of it—it’s the equivalent of having killed Oppenheimer during World War II, destroying all his research. The world would have been a better place if someone had done that, right? So many lives preserved. Well, I could be that person.”

I considered this. He had a point about Oppenheimer. What if he was right about Peter Carroll, and the research that his hard drive contained was going to usher in the eventual collapse of society? I felt a familiar flood of fear. So many years of his teachings, so many essays of his I’d read and regurgitated, about man’s impending doom. I had been so sure he was right, for so long. And now that he was sitting right here in front of me again, I suddenly couldn’t remember why I had stopped listening.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to at least give my father the hard drive to destroy, I thought. After all, its owner was already dead. He didn’t need it back.

My father was still talking. “…And also, you know where I can find your mother.”

I startled back to attention. “Sorry. What?”

“Her address,” he said impatiently. “Where she lives now. It’s not easy to figure out, she doesn’t keep an office and the old house in Atherton is apparently gone. I assume she gave it to you?”

I shook my head. “Why?” I suspected I already knew the answer to this question. It was too horrible to consider.

The air between us felt uncomfortably static, an imbalance in the electricity passing between our bodies. “I just want to talk to her,” he said. His eyes squinted at a spot just above my head. I recognized his tell.

“Well, I can’t help you,” I said flatly. “I don’t know her address.”

At the table next to us, the man in the trench coat had shifted in his chair and was now sitting uncomfortably close. My father noticed this and stood up. “Let’s go.”

We made our way to the door. Out on the street, the rain had stopped, and everything was the color of old nickels. My father gazed up Market Street to where a streetcar was approaching. It was a vintage tram in cheery yellow, like something from an old movie. He looked over his shoulder at me, and I wondered if he wanted me to go with him; and if so, where he planned for us to go. Where was he staying, anyway? How had he even gotten here?

I didn’t want to follow him to find out.

“I have to go to work,” I said. “I’m late.”

“Get your mother’s address; if you’re in touch with her I’m sure this will be simple,” he said. “I’ll meet you back here, at this Starbucks, let’s say three o’clock tomorrow. Bring the money and the hard drive. And after that, if you really want to be done with me, you can be. I’ll leave you alone, let you navigate life by yourself, make your own mistakes. Or you can come with me, and we can build a better world together.” He put his arms out then and pulled me into another embrace. I let myself lean against his chest, inhaled the familiar, faintly sour smell of him, a sensation that sent me dizzyingly back to my childhood. His arms, around me in the dark when I woke up from a bad dream, his voice in my ear whispering that everything was OK, he would protect me from the monsters in the night.

Despite it all, he was still a part of me that I could never excise, the way an amputee lives forever with their phantom limb.

He put his mouth to my ear, and whispered so softly that only I could hear it. “I know you’re still one of the good guys, squirrel. You may have gone a little astray, but I understand, and I forgive. I know that in your heart you still understand what I taught you: that the end of life as we know it is coming, and you and I are the only ones who can stop it. I won’t lie to you. When the revolution starts, even more blood will be shed, and society is going to break down. But only by doing that can we stop the extent of the disaster to come.”

I jerked backward, out of my father’s arms. The tram had stopped just in front of us and my father stepped toward it. “I want you to be with me when it happens,” he continued. “But you are going to have to choose for yourself. Na?veté, or reality.”

The bell on the streetcar clanged, discordantly cheery. My father lifted a hand in farewell, and then turned around and disappeared.